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| Photogenetic Draft No. 24, 1991 © Joachim Schmid |
The arrival at the turn of the century of the Kodak camera marked an important change in personal photography. Cameras now became accessories of middle class life, tools for shaping the identity of the family. Holland quotes Don Slater on how the new consumer technology arrived denuded from its mechanical and conceptual processes. By just clicking a button and returning the package to the lab, the operator was deprived of the means of understanding how images are created and from being able to use those skills and knowledge to create something more radical. Holland notes, though, that a new skill was in fact introduced, that of framing and arranging the content of the image.
Outside of professionals, the full photographic process became the province of “amateur photography,” a mostly male pastime fascinated with technology and aesthetic control and which has “retained its long-lived aspiration to ... pictorialism...” p143
Kodak feminized personal photography in a series of ads featuring young women in various scenes sporting cameras. The company even introduced accessorized cameras in an assortment of fashion colors.
The development of industrial printing and media production led to the emergence of a visual culture based in newspapers and magazines. As society became more mobile, particularly after WWII in Europe and NA, and as women moved back indoors after manning homefront industrial production, the personal camera became a means of imaging domestic life - both at home and on the road. Domestic photography was used by manufacturers to sell the props for idealized versions of domestic life. The decline in family size meant more time was spent devoted to a smaller number of children. The camera was a critical tool in celebrations and rites of passage for offspring. It was also important in shaping the image of family as a happy unit doing fun things together, often in exotic locations - a view of the family central to Kodak’s advertising. What is often not recorded in personal photography are scenes of everyday life, of cooking, washing, cleaning, working.
[Holland doesn’t touch here on a practice I recall from my youth in the 70’s, the post-holiday slide show, when a family returned from holiday would invite the neighbors for a night of viewing holiday snaps. Images were developed into slides and placed in a carousel that rotated images at the push of a button on a remote device tethered to the machine. Images were projected on a bare wall or on a specially designed screen.]
Holland notes, though, the disruptive character of personal photography, of the candid shots of parties and revelries when we let our public image slip, when we are not worried about the presence of a camera. This has morphed in recent generations to celebrations of drunkenness and other debauchery posted quite openly in social media.
21st Century Contemplations
Holland observes that producing an account of recent personal history is more difficult for having living knowledge and memory of the period, for being involved in the cultural construction of meaning out of which images grow and which they reflect. In order to do so, we have to be able to distance ourselves, to be become readers, rather than users, in order to find meaning and significance beyond memory and nostalgia. This can be done through filters of race, gender, sexual orientation, local or regional concerns, or international politics. The important thing to remember is that personal photographs are to be understood by an interpretive community and to understand their potency we have to be able to read the assumptions of the community and how images function therein. Often times these interpretive communities overlap, as in the the example Holland provides of a family marrying across cultures.
Regarding pictorial assumptions, Holland notes ceremonial occasions are particularly rule bound and perhaps easier to decode. Think of weddings, for example, where particular kinds of photos are required and for whom a professional is engaged who understand these rules.
[The question I have is whether some of these pictorial assumptions are universal, rather than specifically cultural. That is, does every cultural exhibit some of the same assumptions? Holland concludes the chapter with the work of Joachim Schmidt, who collects snapshots from around the world, displaying them in new and unique ways, and perhaps giving us some clue to answer this question: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/joachim-schmid-celebrating-photographic-garbage#slide-24]
A long section follows regarding photographers who set out to deliberately undermine the assumptions of their user group by using photography to explore divisive, rather than unifying, themes. That is, these photographers were not interested in the happy family typically described in personal photography, but in describing some other unhappy reality such images typically conceal.
Today personal images are shared online perhaps only moments after being captured and may be viewed by a far wider audience than any past personal photography. A picture is no longer a material object, a piece of paper, does not take time to develop, and in the midst of thousands of such images is not particularly treasured. With the rise in interest in personal photography as a field in its own right, galleries and publishers are now exhibiting and distributing books on personal photography.
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